From the collection of Samuel Untermeyer, Esq.
earnestness in ourselves; and with a comprehensiveness that permits each of us to draw from it what particularly satisfies himself,--qualities that are the unfailing distinction of the great works of imagination.
Some of his pictures, in which we shall find these qualities conspicuous, are “Normandy Church” and “Normandy Farm,” painted during the years that he lived at Villerville and Honfleur, “The Sun Worshippers,” “Autumn on the Susquehanna,” “Sand Dunes, Lake Ontario,” and “Headwaters of the Hudson.” Individual preferences count for very little; but I cannot resist the pleasure of recording a particular fondness for the “Normandy Church” and “Sand Dunes.” In the former it will be remembered how the roof and tower of the church, embrowned with centuries softened by moss and lichen, stand like an embodiment of stability against the quiet movement of fleecy clouds that cross the blue sky, like a token of faith and protection to the little cottage on the left. It is an idyl of the permanence of hope and consolation in a simple faith. Then what a full-lunged inspiration of rest and vastness does one draw from the “Sand Dunes”! It is not the vastness of distance, for the evening sky is wrapping with greenish gray the sand hillocks, which are separated from us only by a belt of warm green-brown grass and a strip of golden-brown scrub. But it is the character of the scene that is vast in suggestion. We do not feel the sky to be a quilt of softness, but an abyss of tenderness, assuaging the desolation of the spot,--a desolation that has the feeling of primeval loneliness.
For, at the risk of repetition, I would dwell once more upon the elemental quality that characterizes all the best work of Homer Martin. Not only is his theme elevated and serious, clothed moreover in pictorial language of corresponding significance, but it shuns the trivial and transitory and attaches itself to what is basic in nature’s beauty and perennially true. In his masterpieces there is the evidence of a great mind, for the time being unreservedly consecrated to great ends, and expressing itself in an imagery of grandeur and enduring suggestiveness. To recognize these qualities is to rank him highest of all the poet-painters of American landscape.